Single molecule experiments challenge the strict wave-particle dualism of light.

Single molecule techniques improve our understanding of the photon and light. If the single photon double slit experiment is performed at the "single photon limit" of a multi-atom light source, faint light pulses with more than one photon hamper the interpretation. Single molecules, quantum dots or defect centres in crystals should be used as light source.

The database dbEST correctly predicts gene expression in colon cancer patients.

This study aims to test the predictive power of gene expression data derived from NIH's database dbEST, which collects gene expression results from a large number and variety of DNA array experiments. The motivation of this study is to make comparable experimental studies, which are usually performed only for one or a few tissues or organs, with a wide variety of other tissues. Confirmation of a good predictive power of dbEST would put a number of interesting and partially surprising recent findings, solely based on data mining, on a more solid basis than available so far.

tuple_plot: fast pairwise nucleotide sequence comparison with noise suppression.

Summary: The program tuple_plot identifies and visualizes local similarities between two genomic sequences, typically 100 kb or longer, by applying the well-known dotplot principle. A dictionary of sequence words built from the input sequences serves to construct a task-specific expectancy model that is used to attribute significance values to pairwise word hits. The dictionary-based approach allows fast computation, the computation time scaling to O(N log N), depending on the size of the input sequences.